Access points and gateways are used to facilitate the connection between devices on a local network and a wider network, most commonly the Internet. Access points can be found in many homes, often in the form of a router, and in nearly every business, where access points enable devices to gain access to the Internet thereby, often including both permanent or semi-permanent local devices as well as guest devices, such as customers of a business that are provided free or per-subscription wireless Internet access.
Home or business owners that use access points sometimes find themselves in need of a new or additional access point. For instance, the entity may have a desire to upgrade the speed or configuration of their local network, connect to a different type of external network, or add in a type of access point referred to as an “extender,” which will add an additional access point to their local network to help strengthen or widen the range of the network or strengthen is signal(s) that will enable local devices to connect through to the Internet. In these cases, the home or business owner will usually have to access their current access point's configuration, often following an authentication process, and make a note of all of the configuration options they currently utilize, which, in many cases, can be a significant number of options. Then, the home or business owner must access the configuration of their new access point, often through a separate authentication process, and manually replicate each of the configuration options. This may be a time consuming and difficult process, particularly for networks where a large number of access points may need to be replicated, or for home owners that may be inexperienced with configuration of access points.
Some access points have been developed that are able to copy configuration data from a local network of which it is a member. However, such access points must first gain access to the local network to be able to copy the configuration data. In these cases, partial configuration data, most notably the network identifier (e.g., the “service set identifier” or “SSID”), password, and security type, must first be supplied to the access point to enable it to connect the local network, after which it may be able to detect and copy other configuration data.
In such cases, an inexperienced home owner may be able to copy a complex configuration to their new access point, but still must first manually configure the connection of their new access point, which may still be a time consuming process involving the user connecting the access point to a computing device, authenticating with the access point, providing the configuration data, ensuring the access point can connect to the local area network, initiating the copy of the configuration data, and then installing the access point in its proper location, which is often in a different location than the computing device that is being used to initialize the access point. For business owners that may be installing or replicating a significant number of access points, this time consuming process is compounded. Thus, there is a need for a technical solution whereby an access point in a local network may be replicated with minimal interaction and impact on the user.